Exhibition Information

(출처= VSF)

(출처= VSF)

(출처= VSF)

			Various Small Fires is pleased to present Sunburst, a group exhibition presented in collaboration with Night Gallery at our Seoul location. Bringing together new work by Night Gallery artists Andrea Marie Breiling, Mira Dancy, Samara Golden, and Robert Nava, the exhibition is defined by a spirit of chromatic exuberance. Featuring representational works alongside pure abstraction, the show takes color as a source of energy and a channel for emotion, at once building worlds of fantasy and creating a kaleidoscopic lens through which to observe and understand reality. Presented in Summer 2021, as social distancing restrictions begin to ease across the globe, the exhibition stands as a testament to renewed vitality and human endurance.

The Los Angeles-based painter Mira Dancy is known for vivid tableaux of mythic figures presented in dense geometric compositions. While her paintings have frequently shown her statuesque subjects in scenes of conflict with industrial surroundings, her new works take place within worlds of euphoric nature, pushing at the limits of representation. Dancy explains that the brightly colored forms that populate her canvases frequently depict invisible forces; here the enlivening power of the sun is the subject of her paintings, becoming one with the figures under its rays. A sculpture by Samara Golden, meanwhile, creates miniature figures from resin constructions that evoke stained glass. The figures’ evocative postures present a scene of palpable emotion and narrative tension. Pushed away from humanoid specifics, the sculptures take on a totemic quality, suggesting universal themes of compassion and care between loved ones.

Robert Nava, a New York-based painter, is known for his frenetic yet intricately structured compositions of hybrid creatures drawn from mythology, science fiction, and animals found in the wild. Though he consistently works within an economy of gestures, his new paintings and works on paper mark an evolution of his approach, finding the artist pushing his plays of color into more complex and otherworldly combinations. Meanwhile, a new painting by Andrea Marie Breiling distills the artist’s passion into a gestural, ethereal work of abstraction. Using her signature medium of spray paint, Breiling’s work maps her expressive movements across the canvas, reflecting her energy and reframing it within a bold, dynamic composition.

Altogether, the works in Sunburst present a declaration of spirit, reveling in the power of perception, the feeling stored in the body, and the strength of the imagination. Carrying us out of lockdown, the works situate us in a more vibrant present.

__

Andrea Marie Breiling (b. Phoenix, Arizona) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Broadway, New York; Achenbach Hagemeier, Düsseldorf, Germany; and Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium, among others. She has participated in group exhibitions at numerous galleries including but not limited to Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Achenbach Hagemeier, Berlin, Germany; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles; Harper’s Books, New York; Skibum Macarthur, Los Angeles; Tin Flats, Los Angeles; and 356 Mission, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Artforum, LA Weekly, Cultured, The Los Angeles Times, and LALA Magazine. She lives and works between Los Angeles and New York City.

Mira Dancy (b. 1979, Merrimack, New Hampshire) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Chapter NY, New York; Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City, Mexico; Galerie Hussenot, Paris, France; Lumber Room, Portland; and JOAN Los Angeles. Her work is included in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Whitney Museum, New York; the Columbus Museum of Art; and the YUZ Foundation, Shanghai. In 2015 she was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. She has been covered in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, Kaleidoscope, and ArtNews, among other publications. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Samara Golden (b. 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan) has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and CANADA, New York. Her monumental installation “The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes” was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Nicelle Beauchene, New York; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; and was featured in the 2014 Hammer Biennial, Los Angeles and “Room to Live” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2015 a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA PS1, and her work has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Mousse among other publications. Golden’s work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; The Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Golden lives and works in Los Angeles.

Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Pace Gallery, Miami Beach; Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York; Sorry We’re Closed Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; and V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Wayne State University, Detroit; and Safe Gallery, Brooklyn. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami. Nava has been the subject of profiles in LA Weekly and GQ, among others. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.